An expert in vision and visionary leadership, the British business coach of Russian origin Oleg Konovalov is known as the Da Vinci of his field. Along with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Oprah Winfrey, he is one of this year’s top hundred motivational speakers in the world, according to the Global Leaders Today magazine. Kommersant UK asked Oleg about the obstacles to success faced by Russian business people in Britain and how they should continue to do business and develop in the current circumstances.
Oleg, they call you the Da Vinci of visionary leadership. How did you manage to make the journey from mechanic on a British North Atlantic trawler to becoming a business coach whose name is well known in the West? What set you on this path?
A biography isn’t just a collection of facts. It is a compilation of my impressions and the lessons which I have learned. Each step taught me something new and gave me new opportunities.
Like anyone else, I suffered from fear of public speaking. I was afraid to give an interview on the radio or a podcast, and I justified this fear in many different ways; I’ve got nothing worthwhile to offer, I’ve got an accent, etc. One of my friends helped me, an American, who put it really well; ‘You must have something to offer that other people don’t, or they wouldn’t want to interview you. Your accent is your unique calling card which makes your brand stronger and more distinctive. As both a Russian and a Brit, you look at things from different perspectives. That’s what you can do and we can’t’. Today I do more than sixty interviews a year, including on the teleshow Good Morning America!, and I give talks in various different countries.
Every knock life’s given me has shown me not that I’ve failed, but that what I need to do is to think bigger and choose more meaningful aims. Badly chosen aims, when attempted too quickly, are what really kill us. If you set the right aims, then any mishaps along the way to achieving them are just signs that you need to make some adjustments. When you’ve made those adjustments, getting the job done often turns out to be not such a time consuming task as you had thought. As an immigrant arriving in Britain or any new country, you may have had to reduce your expectations. Your living standards and career prospects may have gone down a step or two compared to what you had previously been accustomed to, but this is not a life sentence. A few years ago I went through quite a serious crisis, and I lost a lot of money. At one point I thought ‘what are greater? My problems or my aims? The answer was so obvious that it gave me the strength to overcome all my difficulties.
You mustn’t be frightened to start something new. Something you’ve never tried before. My British friends, who have known me for a very long time, still like to joke and call me the Fish Gangster. At thirty-seven, I realised that I wanted to continue my studies (which was a strange decision for someone in the fishing industry). I did a Master’s and then I went on to do a PhD. At the same time, I kept up my job as a leader in an industry where work goes on 24/7. If people had told me ten or fifteen years ago that I was going to write books, I would have had a good laugh. Today my books are published in the UK and US and they are translated into different languages and my articles appear in leading publications. Fear of something new is a normal human reflex. The confidence to think and act differently is a skill we can learn.
In these times, people are changing citizenship just to stay in the saddle. Is global recognition achievable, despite your nationality?
I have learnt an important lesson; people aren’t interested in your nationality; they’re interested in what value you can bring to others. Those who put nationality or origins first are idiots, a word that sounds the same in all languages. Don’t pay attention to those fools. I work with large and medium sized companies from different countries, such as the US Treasury, Saudi Aramco etc. I train leaders from more than thirty countries. They all know very well where I come from, and it doesn’t bother them. What they are interested in is the value of what I have to offer. My main field is visionary perspective and foresight. I help leaders to become visionaries and masters of the future. I help companies to increase their capitalisation twenty or thirty times over. Demand for this just keeps on growing. The world flies gratefully on helicopters created by the Russian engineer Igor Sikorsky, it listens to the music of Dmitry Shostakovich and watches televisions invented by Vladimir Zworykin. Nationality may be the easiest way for others to identify you; you may be Russian, Ukrainian, British or American, this is a demographic fact. On the other hand, we make our nationality into a kind of internal impediment on which to painfully whack our own foreheads; ‘I am Russian, and this is somehow bad’. Never apologise for your nationality. The value that we give to other people is much more important than the question of our origins. It’s not important where you’re from. What matters is where you’re going. It follows that the more value you create, the more recognition you will receive.
You work with successful leader from all over the world. What makes Russian leaders different from Western ones?
There is no difference between Russian and Western leaders. There are differences between leaders and non-leaders. All strong leaders have traits in common, whereas all non-leaders have similar reasons for being the way they are. Strong leaders think and talk about solutions. Weak leaders think and talk about problems. For strong leaders, any setback is a stepping stone towards success. For weak leaders, any setback is a punishment to be endured. Strong leaders make complicated things simple, which reflects their organised thought. Weak leader complicate anything that can be complicated, as well as things that cannot. Their thoughts are chaotic. Strong leaders help people to grow. In their turn, the people they have helped make these leaders yet stronger. Weak leaders attempt to grow at the expense of other people. I could go on with this list, but, as my good friend Alan Mulally, the former CEO of both Boeing and Ford Motor Company says, leadership is a labour of love. You’ve come to Britain? That’s great! You have a wonderful opportunity to become stronger and better. Show your love and care for your family and the people you work with. Here, there is a marvellous environment for doing this.
What conditions are necessary to achieve great things?
I need people to learn from. We are all constrained by three barriers; the walls of our prejudices, the mirrors in which we look for our own imperfections and the liars who deceive us with our own consent. To break out of this triangle, to grow and achieve great things, I need to constantly learn from people who are better at doing things than I am. I have been very lucky to be able to talk to amazing people from different countries. Every achievement is the result of an effort to work on yourself and overcome your old ways of thinking. When it comes to vision, or forecasting the future, I realised that we are being held back by mental outmodedness or mind lag. When we travel across continents, we know that we need to adjust to the new timezone. When we start to work on vision, we become time travellers of the mind, going from the present into the future. To do this, we must take into account mind lag; the difference between our current mental state and that which will be required in the future that we foresee. Having vision means being able to close that mental gap with the time ahead.
There is another interesting aspect. Many years ago, my friend Carmel, a British lady of aristocratic background, asked me this question: ‘What is altruism, in your opinion?’. Without the slightest doubt that I was right, I answered as any Russian would; ‘altruism is being able to give your last breath’. Carmel laughed and explained that, initially, the Roman concept of altruism had been an action that helps others, but without hurting yourself.
What common obstacles to success do Russians encounter in Britain?
I have observed that there are several reasons why people from the Former Soviet Union find it difficult to grow and achieve success. Here are the three main ones:
The first reason is about the social order. We are from a country where the very idea of functioning social classes was completely destroyed in 1917. The cooks run the country, professors make their living as taxi drivers and meteorologists become political commentators. We don’t understand who we are or what our roles are in society. Nor do we respect the roles of others. Britain is a country in which each class and each person fulfils a certain function and plays a certain role. Consequently, everyone knows who they are, what they are doing and why. They also respect the roles of others, irrespective of what it is that these others do. If you live in Britain you must have a clear understanding of your role and the function which you are fulfilling in society. If you do, you will respect others and they will respect you, allowing you to continue to grow and advance in your profession. If you do not, you will have to struggle with an inferiority complex or impostor syndrome. As soon as you utter words such as: ‘I’m only a middle-manager now, but, oh boy, what a boss I was back home!’, you have accepted your inferiority. Your brain is no longer working toward success and you have assumed the position of a victim of circumstance.
The second reason is that Britain, like any Western country, is a rapidly changing environment. Russia is also changing, but there, turmoil predominates. This means that here, we have to adjust our view on life and everything that is happening around us from the level of the daily fluctuations to concentrate on the key changes which affect our lives and businesses. This allows us to see more opportunities, and exploit them.
The third reason is that for some reason, we struggle to tap into our own resources. The successes of our compatriots make us jealous and we never give each other a leg up. It’s difficult to say why this has come about and there’s no point digging around for reasons. To understand your potential for growth, you need to be able to observe the efforts of others and see how they have achieved success, and also to be happy for them when they do. The British judge these things simply; if someone doesn’t support their own, they must be an unreliable person.
What is success for us?
As I understand it, success is the short-term result of long-term, planned efforts. Some people manage to achieve success once, whether at work or in business, and only a few repeat their success enough times to be considered successful. As the saying goes, you cannot step into the same river twice, and it follows that you can’t achieve new success with old ways of thinking. To remain successful, it’s necessary to constantly change your way of thought.
You have moved to a different country, so learn to think differently, as fits your surroundings. You’re trying to achieve something significant that you were not able to do back home, so you need to think ahead of the curve. In essence, success is the result of renewed approaches to thought and action. Renewal allows you to achieve the best, whether that be in family life or in business. In my work as a consultant and coach, I help the successful to become even more successful. The most difficult part of this process, the key to new success, is to change your way of thinking. For this, it’s not important whether you are Russian, British or American.
